Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a medical image standard for communication of biomedical diagnostic and therapeutic information in disciplines that use digital images and associated data. By using a medical image standard such as DICOM, medical image data can be shared and used among compliant devices, such as imaging systems and workstations. A typical use of DICOM is with two-dimensional (“2D”) ultrasound images that are archived as a simple sequence of video images. Because the image data is typically processed, post-scan converted data, once 2D ultrasound images are stored, none of the post-processing capabilities normally available on the ultrasound system (such as gray-scale maps, edge enhancement, and video filters) are available to enhance the 2D image. This provides the benefit of ensuring that the archived image reproduces as closely as possible what the clinician who stored the image was viewing at the time the image was archived.
Recent advances have generated a desire to store and later manipulate other forms of image data. For example, in the emerging field of real-time three-dimensional (“3D”) imaging (sometimes referred to as 4D, or Live-3D), clinicians would like to be able to apply post-processing functions to archived images, such as extracting a 2D image from a three-dimensional data set (i.e., multi-planer reconstruction (“MPR”)) and viewing a 3D image from different angles. In addition to these 3D-specific post-processing functions, clinicians would also like to apply conventional 2D functions, such as gray-scale remapping, edge enhancement, and speckle reduction, to 3D images.
Although DICOM-compliant image viewers are not capable of displaying and/or manipulating these other forms of image data, the “private attribute” field in DICOM can be used to transmit non-standard image data from one DICOM device to another. Many ultrasound system manufacturers have taken advantage of this field to transmit data that cannot be stored in the DICOM format from a DICOM-compliant ultrasound system to a DICOM-compliant workstation. The workstation may have proprietary software installed to enable the workstation to utilize this non-DICOM data, or the workstation may simply ignore the non-DICOM data.